Top ten girl geeks — Charles Babbage may have invented the programmable computer, but it was Ada Byron (later Ada Lovelace) who is widely credited with writing the first real program for it. She translated Luigi Menabrea's notes on Babbage's machine from Italian, and added her own ideas …

Vodafone's Social Connections — The wireless giant is in talks to give its customers access to social-networking services with their phones — Wireless-phone giant Vodafone (VOD) will let customers use their mobile phones to gain access to online social networking services, BusinessWeek.com has learned.

CIS Finds Flaws in Firefox v2 Password Manager — Chapin Information Services (CIS) has discovered a new flaw in the Mozilla Firefox web browser that exposes saved passwords to clever attackers. — Given the new nature of this type of attack, CIS has named this a Reverse Cross-Site Request (RCSR) vulnerability.

Remote Control Mail: Check Your Postal Mail on the Web — Kirkland, Washington based company Document Command Inc. has launched its consumer facing web interface for postal mail called Remote Control Mail. The service provides an alternative to PO Boxes, mail forwarding or waiting until …

Commercial Break … The thinking went something like this: Chevrolet is all about being revolutionary, right? (That's debatable, but since Chevy's tagline is "An American Revolution!" this is where all discussion starts at its ad agency.) And if Chevrolet is revolutionary, then its advertising ought to be, too.

Filling Pantries Without a Middleman — A few years back, the online grocery business was just about the perfect symbol of the dot-com bust. — A company called Webvan had gone public in 1999, promising to reinvent the $500 billion supermarket industry — retail's largest sector …

Google v. Yahoo! Predicting the Intercept — I came across Ben Charny's article that cited Citigroup's (Mark Mahaney) prediction that Google would overtake Yahoo! to be the top Internet property some time in 2007. I decided to pull the chart below on market share of visits to the top twenty properties …

Why big high tech companies are losing the talent war — [Disclosure: Auren works at Rapleaf, a startup, and is thus biased towards startups.] — Big companies are losing their "A" players and they're struggling to attract "B" players. In an industry where everything is about people …

Genji's Game-Killing Bug — So PlayStation 3 reviewers got an email this afternoon with helpful tips for Genji, straight from the development team. That's a real interesting coincidence, because I was playing Genji when I got that email and I was coming up with some tips of my own for the development team.

Podcast Downloading — Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a later time. However, few internet users are downloading podcasts with great frequency; just 1% report downloading a podcast on a typical day.

Search Engine Thanksgiving Logos 2006 — Google, Yahoo and Ask are showing off special Thanksgiving Day logos in the US today; Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, often with an accompanying Thanksgiving feast with a turkey. In this year and past years …

Flock Ditches Shadows Bookmarking Service — In a blog post yesterday, Flock's Mike Dosik announced that they will no longer support the Shadows bookmarking service (Shadows is a product of Pluck) in the upcoming Flock 2.0 release. A number of angry Flock users commented on the post, wanting to know why.